The present invention relates to a route planning system and method for agricultural working machines.
It was already known from EP 0 660 660 to equip agricultural working machines with “GPS” systems to record the position of the agricultural harvesting machine in an area to be worked. In this process, the operator of the machine determined the route to be driven, and the GPS system—that is actively connected to a recording unit—delivered the position data of the vehicle, which were then used in the recording unit to electronically depict the driving path that had been covered. Systems of this type were an initial step in the direction toward recording driving routes, whereby the initial application was only to record driving routes. It was not possible to use systems of this type to perform advance planning of driving routes to be worked.
Building logically on the idea of displaying driving routes, systems as described in EP 0 821 296 enable the generation of driving routes as a function of external geometries of agricultural useful areas to be worked. The main advantage of these systems is that, for the first time, driving routes can be determined in advance with consideration for diverse optimization criteria, which, in the simplest case, are subsequently processed automatically by the agricultural working machine. Based on the fact that driving paths were defined in advance based on simple geometric interrelationships, systems of this type are only capable of processing the singularly predetermined driving route, whereby deviations from this driving route are displayed or corrected immediately.